Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American RomanceDreaming Revolution usefully employs current critical theory to address how the European novel of class revolt was transformed into the American novel of imperial expansion. Bradfield shows that early American romantic fiction - including works by William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe - can and should be considered as part of a genre too often limited to the Nineteenth-century European novel. Beginning with Godwin's Caleb Williams, Bradfield describes the ways in which revolution legitimates itself as a means of establishing Political consensus. For European revolutionaries like Godwin or Rousseau, the tyranny of the king must be replaced by the more indisputable authority of human reason. In other words, democratic revolution makes people free to investigate the same truths and arrive at the same democratic conclusions. In the American novel, however, the Enlightenment's idealized pursuit of abstract truth becomes restructured as a pursuit of abstract space. Instead of revealing knowledge, Americans explore further territories, manifest destiny, limitless regions of the yet-to-be-colonized and the still-to-be-known. In a spirited discussion of works by Brown, Cooper and Poe, Bradfield argues that Americans take the class dynamics of the European psychological novel and apply them to the American landscape, reimagining psychological spaces as geographical ones. Class distinctions become refigured in terms of the common people's pursuit of a meaning vaster than themselves - a meaning which leads them to imagine the always expanding body of colonial America. However, since class conflict is never successfully eliminated or forgotten, the memory of class struggle always reemerges in the narrative like a half-repressed dream of politics. In Dreaming Revolution, Bradfield reveals and interprets these dreams, opening these American novels to a richer and more rewarding reading. |
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American Literature argues aristocrat Arthur authority believes body Books bourgeois Caleb Williams character Charles Brockden Brown Chingachgook Clithero colonial colonists common conflict crimes culture Deerslayer democratic describes discover discussed disguise dream Dupin Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Huntly establish European fact Falkland feels fiction Fiedler Godwin Grampus human Hutter imagination Indian individuals James Fenimore Cooper journey Judge Temple king landscape language laws Lenni Lenape letter Magua Major Effingham ment mind Mingo Mohicans names narrative narrator nation Natty Natty's nature never Notes to Pages novel original P. N. Furbank penetrate Pioneers Poe explains Poe's poetic political principles Purloined Letter Pym's R. W. B. Lewis readers reason represents revolution revolutionary Roderick's savage scene Sea-Change secret sort space story subvert symbolic Temple's Templeton things tion trans transgression truth ultimately University Press Usher violence Waldegrave's murder wants wilderness William Godwin words York